Design and features
At approximately one half the size of a normal desktop case, HP's slimline Pavilion s3680a is initially a curious looking thing. Designed to sit vertically, it's not quite the three-litre cases we're used to seeing from other suppliers like Acer, and is a good deal heavier thanks to its thick steel construction.
While the sides may be powder-coated matte black, the front is a super shiny piano black, so if anyone ever decides to steal it and fails, you'll have a bevy of fingerprints to prosecute with. A silver trim connects the fascia to the main body, with a silver faceplate across the bottom sliding down to reveal HP's Pocket Media Drive Bay. We haven't yet met a single person who owns one of these drives, so we suspect its usefulness is questionable.
An xD/SD/MMC/RS/CF/MS card reader sits at the top, while vertically on the left is a full-sized Blu-ray/DVD+-RW combo drive. A pair of USB ports and a headphone port are present to the right of this, and the power button is a transparent gem on top of the case, which glows aqua.
The rear shows that the s680a is well featured, with four USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, FireWire, PS2 ports for mouse and keyboard, an antenna jack for the on-board 802.11g Wi-Fi, co-ax audio out, 3.5mm stereo in and out, microphone jack, and a TV tuner which curiously only has S-Video out and a pair of RCA jacks for audio, along with the requisite BNC jack for the antenna.
The video card, a somewhat underpowered GeForce 9300GE features both a DVI port and an HDMI port, should you wish to hook the PC into a TV — however, the form factor is hardly becoming of a media centre PC. Nonetheless, HP has bundled in a remote should you wish to use it as one. Finishing up the internals is a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor, with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a 500GB hard drive.
It's not as quiet as it could be, thanks to the power supply and fan on the CPU (the GPU fan is surprisingly quiet), but it's unlikely to even raise the most groomed eyebrow at more than a metre away. The included wireless keyboard and mouse were unspectacular, the only gripe being that with the keyboard the sleep button is too close to the Esc and tilde button, causing us to send our PC to sleep a few times during the test period by accident.
Performance
Obviously being a small desktop, performance isn't at the super high end of the scale, with PCMark05 scoring 5,535, and 3DMark06 scoring 1,682. This is on par with a mid-range laptop these days, so apart from the TV tuner and Blu-ray drive, the compelling case for this slimline desktop isn't readily apparent, especially at AU$1,700. Unless you definitely need a small desktop, we'd recommend either going for a bigger system, or a laptop, getting an external keyboard, mouse and monitor and hooking up to that instead.
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